Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Nothing Serious Sent To Montlake

I finally got all the information required and sent the file this morning. My suspicion is that the answer will be no.
Probably because I'm conditioned to getting rejected from publishers by now! The book is shorter than what they're asking for elsewhere. OTOH they just got 3000 books essentially that length so it's impossible to know if they feel there's a difference between Avalon writers and people off the street.

I happened to catch a Little House On The Prairie that was on this morning. I don't know how old Laura was in this but she looked like about 12. Almanzo Wilder was running the feed store and he was kind to her but thought of her as a child. She had already fallen in love with him.

Excuse me, what? I read these books multiple times. I don't remember anything like that. I don't remember Laura ever mentioning Almanzo before The Long Winter. (Not Farm Boy, that's an anomaly, it's not in her timeline.) When did Laura meet Almanzo? I remember when she first became a teacher and lived with those horrible people where she cooked potatoes and Manzo would take the cutter out to collect her for the weekends,
I didn't get the feeling she thought he was doing anything more than a favor for Pa.

Here's also what I've come to believe. As adorable as Laura Ingalls Wilder is, and how precious, and how really interesting her life was as a portrayal of pioneering life, I think they were essentially written by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Rose was a journalist and a writer. Laura wasn't, not particularly, although she did articles for the local paper on farm life. I think Laura told Rose what happened and Rose ghostwrote it, with input and oversight, of course. This doesn't take away anything from the books.

What takes away from the story is the stupidity and political correctness of Hollywood forcing feminism into a story when it was probably 30 years before it was on anyone's radar, if not nearly an entire century. It demeans the real people to have a child fighting in the mud over a man. No, I didn't like that at all, and it's no wonder I didn't watch that dumb show.

You can download Rose Wilder Lane's book Discovery of Freedom: A Man's Struggle Against Authority atDiscovery of Freedom

From Wikipedia

A staunch opponent of communism after experiencing it first hand in the Soviet Union during her Red Cross travels, Lane wrote the seminal The Discovery of Freedom (1943), and tirelessly promoted and wrote about individual freedom, and its impact on humanity. The same year also saw the publication of Paterson's The God of the Machine and Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead, and the three women have been referred to as the founding mothers of the American libertarian movement with the publication of these works.[6]
Writer Albert Jay Nock wrote that Lane's and Paterson's nonfiction works were "the only intelligible books on the philosophy of individualism that have been written in America this century." The two women had "shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally ... They don't fumble and fiddle around--every shot goes straight to the centre." Journalist John Chamberlain credits Rand, Paterson and Lane with his final "conversion" from socialism to what he called "an older American philosophy" of libertarian and conservative ideas.[7]